Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I do not agree with the Senator. I want to agree with him because I want to try to do as much as I can to help this committee, but I just do not agree with the Senator on that. The reason I do not agree with him is this: if I read it across to the legislative process where fines are set, for example, that advice may very well have come about because of the read-across for other legislation or a more broad read-across generally. The communication is not properly privileged if one side of it is not privileged. They must both be privileged for it to have legal professional privilege.

The Senator's third point was about the sharing of regulations with third parties. I am very interested in this because I am concerned not just about transparency and how we can maximise that, but also about the process generally in terms of the consultation or the time it takes. We are dealing with 46 infringement cases. I have also identified with the Departments the statutory instruments to come. I do not want a new list, basically. I want to deal with the statutory instruments that are coming in a more proactive way in order that we are not just replacing this list with another list by the time we get to the Presidency, or indeed by any other time. Having gone through all 46 with the Government Departments, I specifically identified five or six, I think - I cannot recall exactly - where I was concerned about the detail I was given by the Department, the process or the timeline. I asked for a deep-dive into the background of those files so I could understand why they took as long as they did and what the processes were. It may be entirely justifiable that it took that length of time; for example, if there were consultations with certain external bodies and the timelines were such. Could those timelines have been managed better? Was the Department waiting for the enactment of other legislation? If so, had it already begun its work on the relevant statutory instrument? Will the Senator allow me to finish?